History Webcomic / Digger

* IfICantHaveYou: [[spoiler:Blood-Tail courted Ed when he was just a young skin-painter, but he didn't much appreciate the fact that she was only courting him because he was a surviving firstborn, which in hyena culture makes him a living good luck charm and status symbol. He fell for her mildly unstable but genuinely loving sister Blood-Eyes instead, so Blood-Tail manipulated her sister's instability until she posed an active danger to her daughter, forcing Ed's hand; she is to this day incredibly smug that her brother-in-law was made an {{Unperson}} (as the law of the tribe states must be the punishment for killing your spouse), but no one, besides no one, is actually in any way deluded about what really happened. Blood-Tail is not a popular lady.]]

* LoudSleeperGag: On Digger, Murai, and Grim Eyes' journey, Digger [[https://diggercomic.com/blog/2008/07/09/digger-477/ notes]] that "Grim Eyes snored like a mole with a busted snout."

'''Murai:''' She means I'm crazy.

* BadAssNormal: Forget gods, magic, and daemons... [[BattleCry REMEMBER TUNNEL SEVENTEEN]]! Grim Eyes and Surka also certainly count.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Boneclaw Mother is very good at delivering these to the deserving, to the point her daughter treats it like magic. ("Do the Thing!") Ganesh defuses a threatened one, however, by saying that any such insight could only be a benefit.

* FurryComic: Sort of. Includes more humans and emphasis on humans than typical for the genre, and dodges most of its other tropes, but there's plenty of furry sapients wandering around as well, including the protagonist, and they're treated as more than just "fuzzy humans".

* AlienLunch: Digger ends up eating liver as part of a hyena funeral. As she's an herbivore, it makes her ''very'' ill.

* SeldomSeenSpecies: Several. You would be hard pressed to find another work that not only has hyenas [[WesternAnimation/TheLionKing1994 (besides the obvious)]], but heroic ones at that. It's even harder to find one with wombats.

* FriendOrFoe: In chapter 2, Digger and Shadowchild come across a village that's been hit by bandits. As they make their way through, they hear fighting in the distance. Shadowchild wonders if they should go help, but Digger points out the difficulties in identifying potential enemies and allies from among strangers in the heat of battle, instead opting for them to carefully pick their way along and look for any survivors they could help.

* FriendOrFoe: In chapter 2, Digger and Shadowchild come across a village that's been hit by bandits. As they make their way through, they hear fighting in the distance. Shadowchild wonders if they should go help, but Digger points out that they don't even know how to tell the different parties apart and that they could well be mistaken for enemies in the heat of battle, so instead they opt to carefully pick their way along and look for any survivors they could help.

'''Digger:''' Go help ''who''? How do we even know what side we're on? And if this is some kind of raid, I'm pretty sure both sides are going to be stabbing first and asking questions later, if at all.

A successful Kickstarter [[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1234535943/digger-omnibus campaign]] was held for it, with the aim of collecting all six volumes into one omnibus. It has the dubious claim to fame of being the only such Kickstarter, ''ever,'' to offer foam pickaxes and pear sculptures as add-ons. Another [[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grimoakpress/digger-unearthed-the-complete-10th-anniversary-collection Kickstarter]] is being held for a 10th anniversary collection from Underthing Press, a publishing imprint founded by Creator/PatrickRothfuss with [[https://www.tor.com/2021/12/14/patrick-rothfuss-and-grim-oak-press-create-new-imprint-underthing-press/ the goal]] of reprinting ''Digger''.

A successful Kickstarter [[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1234535943/digger-omnibus campaign]] was held for it, with the aim of collecting all six volumes into one omnibus. It has the dubious claim to fame of being the only such Kickstarter, ''ever,'' to offer foam pickaxes and pear sculptures as add-ons. Another [[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grimoakpress/digger-unearthed-the-complete-10th-anniversary-collection Kickstarter]] is being held for a 10th anniversary collection.

A successful Kickstarter [[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1234535943/digger-omnibus campaign]] was held for it, with the aim of collecting all six volumes into one omnibus. It has the dubious claim to fame of being the only such Kickstarter, ''ever,'' to offer foam pickaxes and pear sculptures as add-ons.

* RefusalOfTheCall: Subverted. Digger knows she'll take it in the end, she'd never be able to live with herself otherwise, but she's bloody well going to stomp around kicking stones and brooding about it for a while first.

** [[spoiler:Shadow [[FanNickname (Shadolescent? Shadult?)]] later explains that all previous demons have either been born feral or raised by others of their own kind, and that thanks to Digger, it is the first one to have been raised to be "good". It plans to do something about that.]]

* AbsurdlyDedicatedWorker: The Dead God Underground has so-called "cold servants", implied to be vampires, which ceaselessly force its heart to beat in order to keep it alive.

* AlienGenderConfusion: Initially averted with Digger herself, who is always identified as female (when her sex is relevant at all), despite being a furry, cylindrical member of a species nobody else in the story has ever encountered. She had barely visible breasts in early pages, but the artist phased these out later. However, the trope is played straight for the hyenas, with several characters expressing inability to determine their sex. This is TruthInTelevision: hyena sexes are difficult to tell apart even for those familiar with them.

* AllTrollsAreDifferent: Especially Surka (who, admittedly, is only a ''professional'' troll, and was not born as one), but the 'normal' trolls are pretty strange, too. The cartoonist has actually explained where their design came from: she started wondering why trolls would hate goats so much, and eventually decided they must be the distant ancestors of domestic goats. Imagine how wolves would feel about Chihuahuas if they understood their relationship, and you have the general idea.

* AnnoyingArrows: Subverted. After defeating all but one of the bandits raiding the village single-handed, Digger is shot in the shoulder with a crossbow at close range. Just when it looks like Digger is going to shrug it off and beat up the guy who did it, she passes out midway through what was probably meant to be her NoMoreHoldingBackSpeech. [[FromBadTOWorse The fact someone broke off the shaft]] [[WorstAid and got the head wedged under her collarbone]] did not help; Digger needed immediate and major surgery and was incapacitated for a realistic period of time, and may now be addicted to poppy milk. (She gets better! ...Eventually.)

** Pretty much every character (apart from maybe Shadowchild) is this, even ''[[CombatPragmatist Boneclaw Mother]]'', though she does her best to keep it a secret.

* BeatStillMyHeart: {{Inverted}}; the heart is not beating on its own, nor is it a sign that its owner is alive. Instead, a team of slaves pull on ropes that force it to beat and keep an [[OnlyMostlyDead otherwise dead god]] alive [[WhoWantsToLiveForever against his will]], even though the rest of him has rotted away to bones. When the protagonist skeptically lampshades this, pointing out that the heart isn't even hooked up to anything, she receives the explanation that [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve it's the metaphor of the thing that makes it work]].

* BookEnds: A (probably) unintentional example with the chapter covers. Chapter one doesn't have one, because Ursula didn't know she'd be writing a multi-chapter work, and she never went back to do one. Chapter twelve doesn't have one either, because she didn't want to break up the action, and was looking forward to [[http://www.diggercomic.com/?p=812 the opening page]] she used for that particular chapter (though there's some agreement that it makes a good cover on its own). Consequentially, the first and last chapters are also the only ones [[NoTitle without titles]].

* CatchPhrase: "Blood and shale!", "Mother of moles...", and "As ''my distant relative'' used to say". Not to mention the facepalms.

** [[spoiler:''Ed'', of all people, when he realized there was no help for Blood Eyes and he had to kill her to save their daughter from her abuse. She was a powerful warrior and he was a puny skin-painter... so he tore out her throat in her sleep when she couldn't fight back.]]

* TheyHaveTheScent: The [[spoiler:cold servants]] let out a distinctive cry in the distance as they pursue Digger and Surka.

* [[WhatMeasureIsANonHuman What Measure Is A Non Hyena?]]: Hyenas don't consider non-hyenas people (and thus are fair game to be hunted and eaten, among other things). This isn't absolutely insurmountable, though -- Digger, for example, is formally adopted into the hyena clan, and Grim Eyes ends up getting along with Murai and Shadowchild fairly well.